MF Metaphoric Trips

From: 3rdWavedave (dlt44@ipa.net)
Date: Tue Sep 19 2000 - 19:37:18 BST


All

I'll focus on the metaphorically obvious.

Life is a trip.
Reality is a journey.

The metaphor of ZaMM: life is a motorcycle road trip, in Lila, sailing
around the world. The appeal is that both are "dreamed of" experiences
for many. Some of the general qualities of trips that capture the
essense of the MoQ are:

Even though on both trips, other characters are involved, it almost
feels like they are each by themselves and, in the end, life or reality
are solo trips each personally and individually unique.

Puttering down a blue highway in the bright sunshine or pushing into
a sweeping left hander at a 100 miles per hour, your perceptions of a
continous flow of pure experience is the basis of your reality.

All of that continuous flow of experience will compete for your
attention but only a small part (blackbirds on the cattails, the
meaning of life, the rattle of a chain needing tightening, your bladder)
will succeed in catching it. Those qualities that succeed will be named,
catagorized, maybe thought about and later recalled as your "experience"
of the trip. But they were not the trip.

In Zen we find that attending predominantly to static qualities like the
intellect can lead insanity, in Lila, that attending just to dynamic
quality can too. Coming in to that sweeping left hander (or life or
reality) at a 100 miles per hour it's better that your attention not be
on lilt of the blackbird, metaphysics, or even the physics of
motorcycles, but rather on the oneness of you, the bike, and the road.
Or to turn a borrowed phrase, the road smay kill the metaphor.

"Trip" implies movement, action. The act of sailing,the act of
motorcycling, reality is principly actions or events, a continous
dynamic stream of them. The snap shots, journals, cheap postcards, the
dent in the rear fender, and the bullshit you pass out in the bar about
them, are the static qualities of the trip.

It's reasonable that I should doubt the veracity of your trip stories,
and you, mine. But with a couple more beers we should be able to come to
some agreement on who's the better liar.

3WD

MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org



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